NANOG gathers ISPs, both large and small, content providers, enterprise users, a few ops-oriented researchers, and some vendor engineers. It is held three times a year, all are welcome. The winter meeting was held in Dallas 12-15 February, yes over Valentine's Day. As I chair the NANOG Steering Committee, and many folk were unhappy, there is some hope that I can fulfill my promise to my wife that it will not meet on Valentine's again.

The format has tutorials, some 'birds of a feather' (BoFs) sessions, and about half the time is spent in general session where various (non marketing!) presentations are given. A list of all the presentations, with copies of the slides and streaming record, is at http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0602/agenda.html.

-Nick Feamster's lightning presentation showing spammers making very short-lived bogus routing announcements and then generating spam from them. The major contribution was correlation between watching BGP routing and seeing spam at spam 'honeypots' (hosts set up to trap and measure spam).

-Various talks and negotiations about the design and deployment of X.509 certificates attesting to the validity of IP Address ownership and how that would allow formal verification of BGP announcements into the global routing system.

-Kenjiro Cho's and Ruri Hiromi's on the technical issues with IPv6 deployment and progress on them.

-Sandy Murphy's lightning talk on the status of deployment of DNS Security (DNSSEC) and Routing Security.

-A lot of negotiation about peering happens in the corridors. As IIJ is a major international provider, I get approached by many old friends in the ops community and redirect them to our peering management folk in New York and Tokyo.

The next NANOG will be in the second week of June in San Jose, California.

APRICOT tries to be the NANOG of the Asia/Pacific region, but cultural and language barriers have fostered many sub-regional NOGs, Japan's JaNOG, Southeast Asia's SANOG, NZNOG, PACNOG, etc.
But APRICOT remains the one region-wide operators' meeting. It has a much more vendor and formal spin than any of the other conferences, with tutorials and workshops predominating as opposed to inter-operator discussions, network ops/research etc.

APNIC, the Asia Pacific IP Address management organization holds one of its two member meetings a year cooperatively with APRICOT. APNIC is one of the five Regional IP Registries (RIRs), along with AfriNIC in Africa, ARIN in North America, LACNIC in Latin America and the Caribbean, and RIPE in Europe. The APNIC meeting has two flavors of content, operational technical presentations and discussions relevant to IP address management and other forms of stewardship, and IP Address allocation policy making.

PAM was held in Adelaide 30-31 March. I was on the Program Committee, chaired a session, and had a research paper accepted to the conference. Yes, that's two trips to Australia in a month. Papers can be found at http://pam2006.org/2006/. They are deeply technical papers on Internet measurement, so I will leave it to the reader to see if anything on the program is of interest to them, see http://pam2006.org/2006/program.html.